After Sandy, disaster recovery is on everyone’s minds. But for companies who can’t find the budget for a full-on business continuity plan, here’s a way to start small by focusing on your post-disaster communications plan. this ensures you keep in touch with customers and employees.

Services like Instagram provide a huge trove of photos for traditional news outlets to enrich their coverage of major events like the election or Hurricane Sandy. A novel approach by NBC shows the opportunities and challenges of user photos.

Foursquare has released a heat-map of check-ins showing how Hurricane Sandy affected local traffic in Manhattan. The southern half of the city, which suffered blackouts and flooding, took the brunt of it the impacts.

What should be done with Twitter prankster @ComfortablySmug? The topic sparked quite a discussion among GigaOM staffers this morning, and we decided to share it with you all, thinking you might want a glimpse into how we think about our world.

AT&T and T-Mobile have signed a roaming deal that lets their customers in New York and New Jersey make calls on which ever network is strongest in their area. The deal helps customers who are struggling with poor service in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

Peer 1 Hosting’s small Manhattan-based staff, along with friends and customers, managed to keep the company’s generators at 75 Broad Street going with good-old fashioned brute labor. For two days they’ve hand-carried buckets of diesel fuel up 17 flights. Talk about above and beyond…

Data center sites and colocation centers in and around New York City are struggling to stay online with varying degrees of success. And there are reports of intermittent issues with undersea cables crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

Critics of social media like to focus on how much fake news gets circulated during events like Hurricane Sandy, but Twitter and other services are also quick to correct those kinds of reports, and have become part of an expanding ecosystem of real-time news.

Streaming media powerhouse Netflix says its experience with Amazon Web Services outages led to best practices and technology that can insulate Netflix — and potentially other companies — from the impact of weather-related and other events.

Sandy is certainly living up to its promise as a destructive force, but it’s also serving as a teaching tool for companies whose business is big data. They’re releasing new dashboards, products and case studies demonstrating how data analysis before can save lives and money later.

Schools are closed, subways are shut down, and government officials are urging everyone to stay indoors. So what are folks on the East Coast doing while they are waiting out hurricane Sandy? Apparently, they’re watching a lot of Netflix.

Data centers up and down the eastern seaboard went into emergency mode to keep up and running as Hurricane Sandy churned northwards. But the key to survivabilty is not last-minute prep but long-running practices.